On Saturday, September 23rd, I'll be speaking at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit in Irvine, CA at the Hilton next to the John Wayne Airport. I'll be doing a “Top 10 ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Traps” talk, which makes me the biggest Scott Guthrie/Rob Howard fanboy (Scott recently presented an ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk at TechEd in New Zealand, and Rob Howard's done a “Top 10 Tips for Writing High Performance Websites” talk before).
Anywho, the reason I'm posting this is two-fold. First, I want you to come to the Summit! Yes, I'm talking to you. Come on, go, it will be a day full of fun and educational value, with talks broken down into Architecture, Web, Data, and .NET 3.0 tracks. It's only $79 for the conference. Go ahead and register now.
Second, I'd like to get some feedback/suggestions on my talk. Here are my proposed Top 10 Tips & Traps:
- TIP: Use HttpContext.Items as a per-request cache (stole this shamelessly from Rob Howard's performance talk, but it's my favorite of his)
- TRAP: Not setting applicationName setting when using Membership (a trap many people getting started with Membership fall into)
- TIP: A walkthrough of cool Visual Studio 2005 features (I'm thinking about some of the XHTML validation stuff, code snippets, opening an ASP.NET 2.0 website through the command line/Explorer, etc.)
- TIP: Client-side enhancements (the new OnClientClick property, the Focus() method, etc.)
- TIP: Efficiently paging through large resultsets with SQL Server 2005's new ROW_NUMBER() feature
- TIP: Using Reflector (not really ASP.NET-specific, but a tool/knowledgeset every .NET developer should have)
- TRAP: How to handle broken images/links in images, CSS files, etc. A common problem when using a Master Page in one folder and having ASP.NET pages in different folders. In short, use ~
- TIP: Disabling view state for data Web controls to reduce page bloat
- TIP: Use caching. An overview of data caching, output caching, and SQL-dependent caching
- TRAP: Avoid race conditions when caching - see http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/1982.aspx
I'm a little wishy-washy on some of these, this list was what I came up with a couple days ago. Care to help me shore up this list? Any suggestions for tips/traps? Any tips/traps you'd prefer removed, or relegated to “Only cover if you have adequate time?”
Any suggestions, comments, ideas, and constructive criticism is most welcome. You can either post it as a comment here, or drop me a line at mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com
Hope to see you at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit!